JERTIH: Besut Polytechnic lecturers and students have developed an online diet food ordering application for patients of the Besut Hospital here to replace the manual method used by the hospital previously.
Besut Hospital director Dr Wan Muhammad Faizuddin W Mohd Fauzi said the application enables nurses to place diet food orders at the hospital’s Dietetic and Food Service Unit compared to the previous practice of having to manually fill in a form for every food order for the patients.
“Previously, orders were made by filling up forms and sending them to the Dietetic Unit twice a day, at 7 am and 2 pm. But patients come and go because during that period new patients are admitted to the ward and some are discharged.
“With no uniformity in the collection of data, this leads to food wastage. This application can monitor real-time data between wards, specialist clinics and operating theatres in the process of ordering food,” he told reporters at the handover of the ‘Smart Nutrition System’ innovation project Version 1.0 to the Besut Hospital’s Dietetic Unit.
Also present were the Ministry of Higher Education’s Polytechnic Education and Community Colleges Department director-general Dr Mohd Zahari Ismail and Besut Polytechnic director Che Mukhtar Bakar.
Dr Wan Muhammad Faizuddin said the application can also reduce paper usage and save time.
He said the application has been in use at the Besut Hospital since Jan 12 after getting positive feedback from hospital staff, who described it as simplifying their task.
Meanwhile, Dr Mohd Zahari said the innovation was developed by the lecturers and three final-year students of the Diploma of Information Technology (Digital Technology) of the Besut Polytechnic.
“Last December, this innovation, the result of six months of research and development, won the Gold Award at the Students’ Exhibition and Innovation Project programme organised by the Information Technology Department of the Besut Polytechnic, which had judges from industry players and lecturers from Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM).
“This application is the first to be developed by a polytechnic in the country for use in a hospital and it reflects the close collaboration between the Polytechnic Department and Community Colleges together with the Besut Hospital in finding an innovative solution to raising the quality of healthcare services,” he said. - Bernama
